In traditional Internet applications, such as a point-and-click, page-based Internet application, each time the user has an interaction with the application a new page gets loaded or the active page gets re-loaded. To create interactive experiences without page re-load, an increasing amount of development has been focused on building rich Internet applications.
A rich Internet application is a type of web application that is “persisted” to a certain extent. Each time the user interacts with the rich Internet application, the entire page is not reloaded or refreshed. In other words, when a web page loads and the user interacts with it, another new page is not loaded and the screen does not refresh while the user is interacting with it. Rather, a rich Internet application is a set of pages with different views or “scenes” that can be loaded based on a user's interactions with the rich Internet application. Each scene is a portion of the rich Internet application that is loaded while it is active and then discarded after certain user interactions or events. As such, a rich internet application can be referred to as a persisted Internet application.
An example of a rich Internet application would be Amazon.com. For example, on Amazon.com, when the user is on one scene of the application they may select an item they want to purchase, but when they transition to the checkout of that same application the screen will have different characteristics. Such an application includes a number of different scenes that, for example, allow a user to browse inventory, obtain details about the specific item of the inventory, and purchase that specific item of inventory if desired.
One challenge in developing a rich Internet application is that in many cases the rich Internet application can include a number of modules that are built by different developers. Because different developers write different parts of the application, this makes it hard to develop a full application in a way that is modular. For instance, when two different developers are collaborating in developing a web page application, they may use different versions of the same library that can end up conflicting. This makes it necessary to load (and reload) two separate versions of the application each time it is accessed by a user. Once the application is in use, it might be necessary to make changes, and therefore eventually it can be necessary to deconstruct each of the individual parts of the application. However, the controller of that application is unable to do that because the individual parts of the rich Internet application were not developed together.
Another challenge is that there are not many constructs for isolation or ways to segregate different types of content. For example, modern browsers have limited ability to isolate JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) resources. Another issue is that garbage collection is tricky in JavaScript and non-existent in CSS. To address this problem, one traditional approach focuses on building encapsulated JavaScript modules with corresponding mark-up and CSS data. This approach can work when the application is sufficiently small enough so that the entire application can be pulled down. For this reason, applications that have traditionally succeeded have been reasonably small in scope relatively speaking (e.g., a targeted mail application versus an extensive enterprise platform).
However, this approach can result in performance concerns particularly when the size of the application increases. For larger-scale applications, unified approaches have usually been required that also suffers from various drawbacks.
One existing way to provide isolation is by using an Inline Frame also called an IFrame. An IFrame is an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website. The IFrame HTML element is often used to insert content from another source, such as an advertisement, into a Web page. Although an IFrame behaves like an inline image, it can be configured with its own scrollbar independent of the surrounding page's scrollbar. An IFrame can allow certain content to be isolated and protected from other different content because some of the content in an IFrame can load entirely separately from other content in the same IFrame.
In view of the above, it would be desirable to provide alternative methods, systems and apparatus for developing rich Internet applications.